Thursday, 5 February 2015

EVERYDAY STRANGE - Cacti's Revenge

LAKE PLEASANT, AZ - “Cactus plugging”
is the act of using cacti for target practice. It seems harmless enough, the
cactus doesn’t truly seem to be alive. Their branches resemble arms making the
plant appear like the bizarrely gorganized remains of dried out desert
travelers who didn’t quite make it out. It is a symbol of the desert, an area
to beware, an area of death. In many ways the cactus, like the vulture, are
symbols of death. But no matter how ignorant we may be to the secret life of
cacti, we rarely think of the plant as capable of revenge.

On
February 5, 1982 David Grundman,
24-27 (reports vary) was cactus plugging with friend Jim Suchochi, a couple miles into the desert from the highway, west
of Lake Pleasant. Grundman started
off slowly that winter day, felling a couple lightweight cacti with a few
shotgun blasts. Before long however, a more impressive specimen caught his
attention.

Saguaro cacti are endemic to the Sonoma desert spread between the Arizona and Mexico border. They can grow up to 60 feet high and live to about
200 years, though some specimens have been known to be 300 years old. The
arm-like branches of the cacti don’t grow until 75 years into the life of the
plants. When Grundman locked his targets onto a 27-foot tall, 100 year old
saguaro, he was targeting a plant that had lived to roughly half of its
potential, but it was more than enough time for it to sprout massive 1000 pound
limbs.

It
seems Grundman’s fatal mistake was getting too close to the living thing as he
blasted it to smithereens. After plugging it twice, Grundman turned and called
out to his friend Jim, before a massive branch fell on him, crushing him to
death. Early reports stated he had uttered the partial word “tim-” as in “timber”
before the fatal moment.

It’s
a story that seems too good to be true, and debunkers flock to it hoping for an
easy target, but like Grundman himself, those debunkers find that the target is
not so easy after all, and much more prickly than first imagined. It’s a cautionary
tale, one that tells all who hear it to respect life, all forms of life, no
matter how immobile. The general tone of many of the articles you will find on
this incident is mocking and carry the sentiment that Grundman deserved what he
got. He was immortalized in the 1984 Austin Lounge
Lizards mock hero-ballad “Saguaro”
where he is referred to as a “noxious little twerp”.

For
the record, saguaro plugging is illegal.

Sources:

Sources
are abundant on the web. I wasn’t able to track down the two original articles
that mentioned the story. The first appeared in the now defunct Phoenix Gazette newspaper, the second
appeared in the Arizona Republic
before being picked up by the Associated
Press. But I did find an AZ Republic article that made mention of the story
and seemed to confirm the truth of it.

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